Breathe
by Mitsima
Summary: Forgive discrepancy in author names. Anyway, this was just something I wrote a few months ago. Occurs b/t WA 1 and 2. A peek into a "dependency" based relationship and a rocky start.


Takes place between WA1 and 2. Generally speaking...maybe a month or less after Tokitoh wakes up. So he isn't really Tokitoh-like at this point. Closer to a frightened animal. Still addicted. Still slightly wary of his savior. I'm just testing the waters since I don't know much about the story save for what's been told to me by all the kind ML folk. Eh...it turned out to be a bit darker than I had planned. But WA does have its dark points. Anyway, tell me whatcha think, k?  
  
  
  
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Breathe by Ame  
  
"I picked him up in my thin arms. He'd lost all the grace he'd had before and stiffened out of shape. I suppose he was born only so he could die that way. And I thought, some day I'll die like that too, with my guts all falling out of me."- Kubota   
  
It was going to rain for sure. Kubota had no doubt about that. The humidity clung low to the ground and prowled the damp streets like some disembodied monster that sought to engulf the world little by little, street by street, person by person.In the end, there was nothing to do but wait. Wait until the heat was all around. In your eyes until you teared, stroking your cheek until you burned, caressing your neck until you beaded sweat; reaching down down into your throat and plunging deeper deeper into your lungs. So you breathed it. And to help you enjoy the inferno a little more, you would smoke.   
  
At least that's how Kubota dealt with dark and dank summer nights as well as everything else life threw at him. Dealt with it by perching on the fire escape outside his own window with a fresh cigarette between his lips. A hot gust of wind surged up from the street below, ruffling his unruly brown hair and whisking away the lazy swirls of cigarette smoke dancing in front of his eyes.   
  
Then came the waiting. Knowing that sooner or later the sky was going to open up and cry, Kubota decided that he wanted to be outside to feel the tears fall on him. Wanted to feel the cool drops on his skin and sense the streets hiss as if heaven and hell went tobattle right then and there. The sensation was sweet, breathing in the electricity infused air slowly and deeply after a storm. It filled him. The cold and hot, the water and fire, the heaven and hell. And he wanted to get drunk on it...trying to reach that part in his lungs where tobacco smoke andoxygen couldn't satisfy. Reaching yet never arriving, he would keep taking it in just to get a bit closer.   
  
Perhaps he might just be able to get there, because according to Tokitoh, "one pill is all it would take." But Kubota was never really a person for hard drugs. Cigarettes and alcohol were sufficient. But this... Kubota eyed the fistful of Wild Adapter in his hand...wouldtake me farther than I would ever want to go. With not even an ounce of regret, he held out the pills and let them fall- the tiny capsules clanging softly against the metal until they hit the pavement below where the sizzling heat and forecasted rain would assure their demise. It was the last of Tokitoh's stash...hopefully... inserted Kubota mentally before snapping his attention back to the apartment when the sound of a frustrated cry reached his ears.   
  
*****  
  
He found Tokitoh in a near frenzy, kneeling on the floor of the bedroom and clutching onto his jacket for dear life.   
  
"Where is it?!"   
  
the man demanded feverishly as he looked up at Kubota once the other had opened the door. "It?" The brunette asked and was met by a furious glare."Don't play the fucking innocent! I need-"  
  
"Rest? Yes, I think you do." he leaned down to offer a helping hand only to have it slapped away.   
  
"Keep off!" the other almost snarled before slouching against the bed and burying his face in his hands. "Give it...onegai..."  
  
Kneeling before the anguished stray, Kubota forced Tokitoh to look up by placing a gentle hand beneath his chin. A claw lashed out towards his neck, but he caught it in mid-swipe and held it back in order to get a better look at the other's eyes. The expression he found was like that of a man just condemned to hell. Pained. Desperate.   
  
"Iie." he stated, voice unwavering. "I can't do that."  
  
Tokitoh squirmed at the contact and drew back like a cornered animal, distrustful of the comforting warmth that radiated from other's touch. It felt good, but he didn't want it to feel good because usually for every good feeling he ever felt, ten bad things were felt in reciprocation later on. A fucking bad deal, but in the end, need won over all and he would give in. So when you got right down to bare facts, if whatever it was felt good, it means that he had been losing from the very beginning. And he was destined to keep losing until whatever wanted him, had him.   
  
"Onegai?" the plea got weaker as the fleeting touch turned into a caress that brushed across his temple, down his cheek, across his jaw...almost making him forget that faint humming in the back of his mind though it grew louder and louder with each breath he took.   
  
It was difficult to tell which was being more persistent. Kubota or the Wild Adapter.   
  
"No."  
  
"One?" asked Tokitoh hopefully. His eyes drifted shut as he leaned against the offered shoulder, vaguely noticing the arm that wound its way around his waist and pull him close.   
  
"None." murmured Kubota, smiling to himself with the now docile stray in his embrace.  
  
Suddenly something snapped. Right up there behind Tokitoh's eyes- triggered by the drug's possessive revenge. Then the feeling hit him like a sword going through his gut. He was being reclaimed. Cold. So cold. Freezing. As if his blood were turning to ice right in his veins...stretching down into his fingertips then shattering into thousands of sharp pieces that just stabbed all over. Tokitoh crumpled forward and grit his teeth.  
  
"Tokitoh..."   
  
The voice was distant, soft. He didn't hear it.The hum grew into a roar. Something like a crashing wave of almost tangible heat that soon swallowed him in one gulp and sucked all air from his lungs. Moving his lips to say something, cry something... no sound escaped. Drowning air air drowning air need to breathe can't breathe want want need need...  
  
"Tokitoh, snap out of it..." Wild Adapter.   
  
The words resonated- clear and imposing as church bells in his mind...the only notes in his discordant melody of an existence that sang sweet and loud. She was a jealous bitch, that's for sure. And she made it known whenever she felt neglected. Right down to the bitter truth of the matter, it's what his body was screaming for. Without it, he knew very well that all would go straight to hell's fiery oceans.   
  
He clawed for air. Reached and reached, trying to pull himself up over the flames so that he could get achieve at least one more pure breath. Lashing out and lashing up, he was oblivious to the fact that he was tearing away at human flesh. Tokitoh smelled blood.New blood. Sweet blood. Better than fresh air...Then out of nowhere came a rueful laugh, breaking through dementia's hazy sea where he had lost himself.   
  
Focusing through the swirling mist of withdrawal inflicted bloodlust he saw Kubota, slumped and bloody against the wall. Slumped, bloody and fucking laughing. "Didn't know fate would take me so literally..." the man said hoarsely to himself, a sad smile quirking up the sides of his mouth. The smile. Or maybe it was the laugh. No. It was definitely the smile that made Tokitoh stop dead in his tracks and come back to his senses, beholding with disgust the consequences of a tiny pill.   
  
"Ku...Kubo..."  
  
"Finished already?" asked Kubota weakly, tilting his head up ever so slightly in order to meet Tokitoh's gaze where insanity had been replaced by fear. He laughed again, voice fading every time he spoke. "Don't stop on my account- if you're having fun, that is."  
  
But his words fell on deaf ears. The humming was back, and before it was up to full force, Tokitoh ran. As if the devil himself were chasing him.   
  
**********  
  
It was that type of feeling, you know. The type that feels like those nightmares you had when you were a kid where you would just run, not knowing if anything was following you, but imagining the worst and sure enough, if you turned your head just a fragment of a degree, you would see that horrible *something* at the corner of your eye. And youwould keep running...and you would keep arriving nowhere. The worst was when you ran into the open arms of a faceless "beloved someone" who would then draw back and refuse to protect. After that, it's like...might as well die now.   
  
And then you would wake up...if you were lucky. Or realize that you were never really sleeping in the first place...if you weren't. What to do with the latter situation, Tokitoh hadn't the slightest idea. Hell, the first priority in his half crazed head was to start breathing properly again. Maybe if he could just manage that, at least the world would stop moving around him as if he were on some fucking twisted carousel.  
  
Ring around the rosies, pocket full of posies, ashes, ashes, we all fall...  
  
"Shit!" he kicked violently at an empty trash can, sending it barreling down the dark alley which had turned into his momentary haven. Tokitoh had to admit it. He had reached that dead end he was plummeting towards from the very beginning...wherever it was "the very beginning" had started.   
  
There was just no place to go. He could always go to...no. But he couldn't. Not after...no just...no. Tokitoh coughed and leaned feebly against the grimy brick wall, rough and warm against his back. What the fuck was with this heat? The darkness, pierced only by a flickering lamp post, made everything a million times worse; as if the world were closing in on him.It was suffocating, but there was nothing much to do about it.The blood-lust was (thankfully) gone. He still felt chilled and choked, cold sweat running down his face. Maybe...just maybe...if he held his breath long enough, he could black out and just let the worries slide for the night. In the middle of this dwindling train ofdeliberation, fate had a bit of pity and the exhaustion finally got to him, cloaking the boy's thoughts in that quiet darkness he had so resigned himself to enter.  
  
***  
  
It would be so easy, just to do nothing. Just to be a silent observer in his own life, simply watching and not reacting while things slipped in and slipped out of his lax grasp of life like sand. Komiya was just one of those things. Tokitoh another. The only differencebeing that Komiya had completely sifted through to a place where he couldn't be salvaged anymore and Tokitoh...well...he was getting there.  
  
A crash of thunder jolted Kubota from those ruminations and he brought his attention back to more fixable matters. The wounds were shallow, but they hurt like hell, the ex-yakuza concluded as he carefully wound a bandage around his torso, an unlit cigarettedangling between his lips. The rain had finally started; gently at first, then with ever minute that passed, it gradually grew into a raging downpour.   
  
Wind thrashed and sent raindrops hurling like needles through his open bedroom window and onto the bandages covering his pale skin. A strange sensation ran up his spine and had Kubota been in a more imaginative mood, he would have mused that it was Komiya saying in some supernatural way, "Why the fuck did you let that happen to yourself?"  
  
"Self-fulfilling prophesy?" the former gangster answered to the air then slammed the window closed. He collapsed on top of the bed and noticed the sheets to still be warm from Tokitoh's now absent body. //Strange//, Kubota thought, //I never remembered the bed to be this comfy.// Maybe the cause was that for the past month, he had been sleeping on the floor. He shook his head. No. It was never this nice. Perhaps it was that before, the sheets waiting for him had always been cold.  
  
Tiredly, Kubota wrapped the covers around him in a hug of soft cotton and buried his face into the pillow. Then he breathed in as deeply as he would were he outside trying to take in the air of the storm. And it was nice. The pillow smelled of his own shampoo, his own soap, his own cologne, but in a completely different way. Tokitoh's way. There was no other way to explain it, except for the rather vague premise that the stranger had changed the "laws of the universe" around which Kubota's apartment and daily life revolved.  
  
The stray had a tendency to take unconscious possession of things that were never his. The corner place on the couch was Tokitoh's place and no one else's. Kubota would never sit there. The chair facing the kitchen and not the one facing away. That was Tokitoh's dubbed seat as well. The blue mug. Tokitoh's. (The green one was Kubota's). Granted, *everything* in the damn apartment belonged to Kubota, but it came to a point where sitting in a place or using something that Tokitoh unknowingly claimed for himselffelt downright strange.That meant the bed too, but Kubota was stubborn and refused to get up. //My bed.//   
  
But it would be inaccurate to say that Tokitoh was the only one doing his share of claiming. Kubota's frame of mind had also come to a point where imagining the amnesiac anywhere else was impossible. In some other home? No way. With some family? Not likely. With someone else who wasn't Kubota? Never. Ever.   
  
Mine.  
  
Then a thought floated above the multitude of others swirling around drunkenly in his mind, provoked by the memory of a certain disemboweled cat from his childhood.   
  
He might die out there. It didn't seem fair. That Tokitoh had taken so much, only to leave. Kubota wasn't one to give in to greed, but he felt himself entitled to at least one act of pure selfishness in his life. So he kicked off the sheets and went for his jacket.   
  
***   
  
Tokitoh was dreaming through the worst of dreams again. He felt like a child- helpless and alone in a vast vast static darkness. Running from ghosts. Running from things screaming in high pitched voices. Running from things growling his name- the thirst for blood in their desire. The surreal world in which he was trapped seemed to be underwater. Tokitoh's movements slowed to an agonizingly laggard pace. The pursuing creatures were getting closer; which prompted him to run even faster to that figure in the distance calling out to him with open arms. "Come here! Come here! You'll be safe with me. They won't touch you. Hurry! Hurry!" And so he hurried, sprinting through the ocean thick air of the dream world towards the faceless figure framed by a pale golden glow that resonated in the tangible gloom.   
  
Closer. Closer. Hurry. Hurry. Tokitoh finally reached the beckoning body- a beacon to lead him out of the darkness- and threw his arms around it with hope of the promised safety, but to his horror found no such thing. He was embracing a puppet. Cotton arms. A cotton neck. A cotton head. No face. Just whiteness. Cold. Like ice; and stiff. As if it were a corpse wrapped tightly in a burial shroud...a dead body. Horrified, he tried to pull away, but it brought its gauzy arms and gauzy hands up to his neck and squeezed, cutting off the scream that was already halfway out of his throat...  
  
The pitter patter sounds of lightly falling rain filled Tokitoh's ears as he woke. He absolutely refused to open his eyes. It wasn't real. Couldn't be. The sensation of soft sheets beneath his face, chest, and arms. The gentle dawn caress of bed linen... It wasanother cruel dream boxed in another damn cruel dream which in turn had one heartstrings yanking nightmare after another, and one deceitful, open armed "beloved one" after another. Soon enough, though, the invading sunlight struck his face and he could do nothing but confront the morning. Tokitoh was expecting the linen to disappear beneath him and replace itself with the feel of cold, wet pavement. But it didn't. And he woke up to the sight of a place he had been waking up to day after day ever since he had woken up that first day from unconsciousness.   
  
The sweet familiarity of Kubota's apartment was...he didn't know how to explain it to himself...it was like drowning and being pulled up out of the water.Still shaken and gasping for air, it took Tokitoh a while to hear the deep and steady breathing of another. With effort, he turned himself over to find Kubota fast asleep next to him on the small bed- his brunette locks soggy and skin paler than he had ever seen before. For moments that seemed to last forever, the boy watched Kubota sleep- thesteady rise and fall of the other's chest anchoring him to a not-so-terrible reality.   
  
"Kubo-chan..." Tokitoh called in a low whisper.Without waking, the former yakuza leader stirred and near-inaudibly murmured.   
  
Tokitoh deliberated on what to do, but then grew tired of deliberating and closed the gap between their bodies, settling himself as close to Kubota as he could manage. The stray didn't seethe pair of soft gray eyes sneaking a look at him through drowsy eyelids and just nestled himself in the crook of Kubota's neck, sighing contentedly as real arms -warm and truly protective- wound themselves around his shaking frame. Lulled again into unconsciousness, Tokitoh smiled to himself and knew the ghosts wouldn't reach him here.  
  
Late morning came and Kubota found Tokitoh asleep, clutching onto him for dear life. It hurt. Quite literally. It hurt. The bandages needed to be changed. Biting his lip, Kubota forced his way up and untangled himself from the other's embrace, provoking a weak whine from the slumbering cat he took in for a second time. Just when Kubota thought he was near escape, a still dreaming Tokitoh renewed his grip with a near desperate ferocity and forced him to topple back onto the bed.  
  
"Toki- I can't..." he tried to move again, lightly tapping on the boy's cheek to wake him up.   
  
"Come on. Tokitoh lemme..."The desired effect was achieved. Tokitoh grumbled and pulled back, burying his head beneath the pillow to shield himself from the piercing shafts of sunlight that filtered through the thin curtains. Once up, Kubota headed groggily towards his desk where an open first aid kit awaited.   
  
"Kubo-chan?" said the stray from beneath his cave of bed linens.Having removed the last of the bandages, the brunette looked up before grabbing some ointment to daub on the still fresh wounds. He cringed at the sting.   
  
"Mmhh?""Comin' back?" Tokitoh tried to ignore the smell of blood which he knew perfectly well was his own doing.   
  
"To bed?"  
  
"Yup."   
  
"Nah. Time to get up anyway." he reminded the other pointedly, winding a fresh strip of gauze around his abdomen.   
  
"But it's only..." the raven haired boy peeked through a tiny gap in the blankets towards the glaring red numbers on the alarm clock by the bed, "...ten thirty."   
  
"Best time to be up." announced Kubota and Tokitoh could almost *hear* the man smiling.  
  
"What the hell for?" he could hear the ripping of cloth and the quick snap of the first aid box closing shut. A shuffling of feet and the mattress shifting as Kubota took a seat at the foot of the bed. For a while there was silence, and Tokitoh knew that the mahjong playerwas staring out the window.   
  
"Kubo-"  
  
"Just because..." And with that, Kubota took a fistful of the sheets and yanked them off the bed. "...well...just to be up."  
  
"What the fuck!?" Tokitoh exclaimed indignantly, squirming as if he were a hermit crab robbed of its shell. He squinted. Blinked. Squinted again and made his way to the other end of the bed where Kubota had pushed the window open. A mild breeze floated in and ruffled their sleep mussed hair.   
  
Tokitoh expected the other to break out a cigarette like he usually did every morning and was surprised to find that he just sat there, eyes serenely closed. Just breathing. A single eye peaked open to look at Tokitoh who was now staring at him as if he had two heads.   
  
"Air's nice outside." Kubota commented, then fell silent once more. When he spoke again, he sounded thoughtful, if not a little saddened. "The rain should stop soon. So...you going to leave?"  
  
A shrug. Silence. Then, "Who ever said I left? I was just taking eh...taking a walk! That's it. I was comin' back you know. Geeze! Hell, you worry too much..."  
  
The sound of a light chuckle left Kubota's lips. "Don't worry. I won't lapse into the habit." he assured, then out of the blue pounced and pinned Tokitoh to the bed, giving him a quick kiss on the corner of his mouth.   
  
Tokitoh was a micrometer away from feeling scandalized as Kubota's face hovered ever so closely to his own. And for a second, they were breathing the same air. He was blushing furiously.   
  
"I...I...um..." Another another kiss and Kubota was up and heading for the kitchen, stretching as he went.   
  
"I'm up for breakfast. You?" he asked, halfway out the door.  
  
"I...um...I...Kubo-chaaan!" was all Tokitoh could manage at the moment.  
  
"Cat got your tongue?" he joked, tilting his head slightly to the side to avoid frontal collision with the pillow chucked at his face.  
  
"Breakfast. Yeah. Breakfast's good." Tokitoh said almost with a pout, sending ineffective death glares in the brunette's direction. "Hey."  
  
"Hm?""Open the window in the kitchen too."  
  
***   
  
"I regard you as one of those men who would stand and smile at their torturer while he cuts their entrails out, if only they have found faith or God. Find it and you will live. You have long needed a change of air...I know you don't believe it, but indeed, life will bring you through...what you need now is fresh air, fresh air, fresh air!"  
  
- Excerpt from Crime and Punishmentby Fyodor Dostoevsky 


End file.
